‘Castle’ Season 4, Episode 11, ‘Till Death do Us Part’: TV Recap

There’s a wedding, a juice cleanse and a dead pick-up artist on a fruit cart on this week’s “Castle.”

Ryan and his fiancé Jenny have been on a cleanse for week to get ready for their pending nuptials and when Ryan “forgets” his green juice she brings it to him at work. All the pre-wedding juice mocking and talking sparks a little precinct date-talk. Esposito finds out Laney’s bringing a plus one even though they just broke up. Beckett is going alone to the wedding. Castle reveals he’s bringing a beautiful, intelligent date. Beckett looks a tad jealous, until Castle lets her off the hook. His date to Ryan’s wedding is his daughter Alexis. They drop the juice talk and head to a crime scene.

A 28-year-old naked jumper named Michael Bailey has landed on a street side fruit cart, having either hurled himself, or been hurled, out of a seventh floor hotel window. He has scratch marks on his back, which prompts Beckett to say, “looks like he did the deed before taking the dive.” Lipstick on the sheets upstairs make that seem likely, and the room booked under the name Jane Eyre give credence to the theory. Bailey was a junior analyst at a mid-town firm. He lived on 93rd Street, according to the ID he left in the hotel room he jumped or was thrown from.

Now that Esposito knows Laney has a date, he thinks everyone is a prospect and eyeballs everyone on the crime scene and elsewhere in his mission to uncover his identity. He even considers pulling her phone records to figure it out, but Ryan stops him and says he’ll get the name from the soon to be printed place cards. And he does. It’s a cancer-researching college-basketball-playing doctor named Toby Lang and Esposito flips out and intends to bring a revenge date.

The first suspect, a white woman with long red hair was seen hurrying out of the hotel. She left a fingerprint in the room, though, so they bring her in and it turns out she’s a founding partner at a law firm called Keller, Braun and Franklin. She’s Franklin. But when she looks at the picture of Michael, the victim, she insists it’s a guy on business from Chicago named Jake.

“I think I would know whom I’m sleeping with,” she says, to which Beckett replies, “Apparently, you don’t.”

Even though Franklin just met Jake/Michael that night, she thought she was falling in love with him. She says Jake/Michael was dizzy and hot so he opened the window and fell, and then she panicked and ran.

He might not have been pushed out, but Laney reveals through tests that he was poisoned earlier that afternoon. He drank it, long before he met the redhead. Not only that, Michael had sex with another woman that evening some time. The team searches for woman number two.

Instead of two women, Ryan and Esposito find twenty and they’re all in a room at the precinct waiting. Each one thought they were Michael’s one and only.

“This is like the Bachelor,” Castle says, “Without the apple-tinis.”

It turns out Michael was on a leave from work and had told all of the girls he was leaving town. He also hadn’t been to his apartment in a while, but when Ryan searched there he found a fake ID with the name Jake on it and $60,000 cash stashed there.

Beckett and Castle head to Michael’s firm to talk about the leave. His boss says he was a bright kid who took leave for personal issues. He knew little about the leave, but the COO there, another redhead woman, said she stumbled across a dark-haired El Al employee trying to break into Michael’s office the day before. They track that woman down and her name is Colette Roth, former Israeli military, potentially a spy. She claims she and Michael were soul mates and she knew he was in trouble, and she was trying to help him, and that in fact, she had witnessed him getting kidnapped by men in masks. When the team checks the tapes, they confirm Colette’s story and learn she at least got one elbow-to-the-nose-of-one-kidnapper in before he was taken.

Castle insists Michael had to have been an agent or secret, but the FBI and CIA claim to have never heard of him.

They trace the kidnappers’ car and when confronted, they claim they were actually Michael’s friends who abducted him to scare of Colette the stalker. One of them has a broken nose. They say they aren’t spies, that they’re professional pick-up artists and Michael was too, up until a month ago. They said Mike had stopped hanging out with them then, and that he’d been acting weird. They even followed him after the abduction, found him, and were told to call him Jake. They go through the magic of his pick-up that night, and say that it was an odd choice, and that he treated it like a mission, and he kept on her. They friends call it the greatest pick-up of all time and reveal a ledger of his conquests existed. But the ledger has no new entries fresher than one month ago.

Castle flips through the ledger for sport and makes a crazy discovery: Jenny, Ryan’s Jenny, was listed there as gyrating Jenny – May 2009 – one month after they began dating. Castle and Beckett argue over whether to tell Ryan – Beckett says no, Castle says yes. Beckett says, “If we were getting married would you want to know all the guys I had slept with.”

“All?” says Castle, seemingly thrown for a loop.

Ryan and Esposito go to the bar Jake/Michael was at last and they track down an heiress named Lisa Hill, whose sister owns a company that makes poison. Castle and Becket think there’s some sort of extortion scheme from wealthy women like Lisa and the redhead from the hotel. They bring Lisa in and ask her about blackmail, which she denies, but she admits to sleeping with him. She also says she caught him on her computer post-tryst and it turns out he had sent documents from it to himself associated with a deal pending at work with Lisa’s husband. Everyone remembers seeing Lisa’s husband at the firm at which Michael worked.

Espionage/sexpionage becomes the motive of the moment – stealing corporate secrets. Which is strange considering he was on leave…but who authorized the leave…the boss. Back went Beckett and Castle. But they’re still stumped. They find out where Michael might have been staying and find protein shakes in the fridge there, pinpointing the poison location. They checked the videos…and remember that redheaded COO…she killed him because she figured out the espionage while she was involved with him.

While trying to figure it all out, around a table of Chinese food, Ryan breaks the fast – hard — and reveals that Jenny already told him she might be in the ledger. The team is relieved.

At the wedding, Laney and Espo do a quick date intro to each other. Her date is gay and his is his cousin. The chill thaws. Beckett and Castle meet up at the back of the church and decide to be each other’s date. And when Castle says he envies Ryan, Beckett says, “who knows Castle, maybe three time’s a charm.”

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.